The Horrifying Dream I Had (And other interesting things)

Not last night, but the night before, I lay down to go to bed, which I do so successfully after about an hour (I can never get to sleep. these beds are like boards) and somewhere around 5 have this horrible nightmare:
It's as though I'm watching a movie, so I'm just an onlooker, but there is this man who has recently been diagnosed with bipolar or something and he is having a manic episode. His son and daughter or his son and his son's girlfriend are sitting in the car, both in the front seat. The father climbs in the back seat and violently stabs through the back of the drivers seat (where his son is sitting) with a knife that is appx. 12 inches with a serrated blade. The son sits there, in the front seat, slowly dying, and urges his sister or girlfriend to get out, run away, when the father stabs her through the seat too. She dies instantly. Then, the son pulls his own knife (out of NOWHERE) and reaches into the back seat to kill his father. After completing the task, I actually SEE the life go out of his eyes.
So that was that. Needless to say, when I awoke from that dream at about 5 am I experienced some difficulty going back to sleep. I turn on Otto Koning's The Pineapple Series, which is a series of sermons, and begin to browse through the hulu TV shows. However, the website greets me with the lovely picture of  a masked man and the introduction of something to do with Halloween. So I lay in my bed, paralyzed, until about 6, when I fell back asleep until 9, and got up and went to the gym. Hurrah.

So today I was stumbled upon this blog, and a post about the most awesome photos of soldiers, taken by soldiers. Something about men in uniform makes my heart shake a little and my stomach do a flip. Pearl Harbor kind of did me in, with that. Danny (Josh Hartnett) looking so sad when his best friend and childhood hero went off to Britain, his righteous anger. His heartwrenching attractiveness. Anyway, I found these pictures, look at them if you get a sec.
They're pictures of British soldiers, but hey, still cool.
Enjoy the rest of your wonderfully fall-esque day.

My Heart's All A-Patter

For the past three days I've had anxiety about going to bed, and for the past three days I have not slept. You see, all my life I've been hyper sensitive--emotionally and psychologically, especially to horror movies. Well, recently I felt that I had been doing better. I had watched several horror movies that didn't frighten me to my very core and I had very little trouble sleeping following any of them. Thus, watching horror movies this weekend while I was home did not seem like such a terrible idea. On Friday, Sarah, Teebs and I sat down and watched first The Exorcist (how was it legal to make a movie like that?!) and then a movie called Mirrors. Obviously, the first movie not only scared me, but deeply disturbed me. I genuinely believe in demons and possession. I believe in the power that they have and that they can cause serious horror in those who don't have Christ. Seeing something like that happen, even fictionally, twisted something within me. I knew it wasn't something I should have been watching but after a certain point, you simply can't turn it off. You HAVE to know how it's going to end. So we finished that and were fairly satisfied with the ending, however upsetting it was. That was that.
Then, however, we decided to watch the movie that has been the cause of my lack of sleep. I wanted to blog about this last night but I honestly couldn't bring myself to put it into words. It was the story of demons that existed in mirrors and caused horrible things to happen to those who looked into them. Something about this movie absolutely terrified me. And as I went to sleep on friday night on the pull out couch in my living room, I lay across from a large mirror and became almost sick with fear. Paralyzed under heaps of blankets and sweating (it was 80 degrees in my living room) I tried to focus on Confessions of a Shopaholic that I carefully made sure would be on for as long as possible. Finally, I fell asleep around 3, I believe, and woke up slightly terrified at 6:30 when I realized that someone else was awake, which makes me feel significantly safer. I then got up and went back to sleep beside my mom until 9:15, when I carefully made my way back down to the living room and fell asleep for another hour beside Sarah, who never knew I had left.
Now, it's a quarter to eleven and I'm a little nauseous, and feeling very anxious about going to sleep. I register that these things are only movies that really cannot affect me in real life, but somehow illogical things seem to make sense when it's dark and quiet during the wee hours of morning.
So last night, as I lay awake, reading "It's a Hunt Life", I basically made a decision to stay up until I had to get ready for class. I actually looked up what time the sun was anticipated to rise, as if it would comfort me. I believe I feel asleep around six, 59 minutes before the world would awaken.
I'm praying with all my heart that I won't have another night like the last. Nothing terrifies me more than fear.
On a more positive note, I've decided that I want to get engaged in the winter and married in the fall--the colder months are my favorite. I have decide that I want my bridesmaids and I to walk down the aisle to "Love Never Fails" by Brandon Heath. I've decided that while I really look forward to my wedding, I'm not in a rush to get married.  I know that I have a great deal of personal growth to pursue, and that I need to learn to focus more on God and less on the future. I won't be able to be in a solid, loving, steady relationship unless it focuses around Him, and He remains more important than the man that I love. In this light, I figure that I have plenty of time to meet and fall in love with my soulmate, my destined other, what have you. And right now, I'll be working toward soothing my anxious soul and grower closer to God.